Clone Advance Steel settings between PCs

Many people have multiple users and / or PCs in their company using Advance Steel 2018 and we expect that number to grow now Advance Steel has been included into the Autodesk AEC collection. You may have user sections, custom bolts, customised drawing styles or special BOMs that you want to be available to all your users, and you want to make sure that all your users / PCs are using the same setup.

However, whilst it is possible to share databases on a network, that doesn’t help when you are using a laptop on site or working from home. So how can you get exactly the same settings on all PCs?

Actually, this is quite straightforward to achieve, it just needs a little care.

On the original PC:

• Select a PC you wish to copy all the settings from. From this PC copy the entire folder C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Advance Steel 2018 and all of its contents to a safe location accessible to all (such as a network drive).• In the safe location delete all the “ASSettings_User.xml” files from all sub folders.• In the safe location delete all the “*_log.ldf” files from all sub folders.

This then becomes your master data set.

On all other PCs:

• Rename the existing “C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Advance Steel 2018” folder as something like “Advance Steel 2018_Installed”.• Copy the master data set to the “C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\” folder.